


worlds a few ripples away

by OceanMyth



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, snippets of a work i'll never finish, this is a mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29431233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanMyth/pseuds/OceanMyth
Summary: Aang can barely remember the first time he heard someone sing now, but it still manages to be one of his most cherished childhood memories, out of what had been a beautiful rosy childhood. He hopes that he was able to give his children a similar one, but he worries that the pressures of the world had tainted it for them long before they were even born.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), implied additional relationships
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	worlds a few ripples away

Aang can barely remember the first time he heard someone sing now, but it still manages to be one of his most cherished childhood memories, out of what had been a beautiful rosy childhood. He hopes that he was able to give his children a similar one, but he worries that the pressures of the world had tainted it for them long before they were even born.

The memory itself is blurry and indistinct, but the emotion lingers on. It's like his one memory of his birth parents, before he was given to the monks. Everything else faded, including their faces—they probably looked like him, but he has no idea whether he has his mother’s eyes, or his father’s chin—but the feeling of being loved still surrounds him when he calls the memory to mind. 

Perhaps it should be less of a surprise then, that even after all this time he can still remember the warm joy that the singing had filled him with. Almost like his heart had been replaced with liquid sunlight. His own inner song, stirring for the first time. He feels it to this day whenever he hears someone singing. 

The first time Aang ever heard someone sing was the first time he met Monk Gyatso.

Well, he didn’t really ‘meet’ Monk Gyatso, as much as he’d been handed over to Monk Gyatso to raise after the Council of Elders determined that he was the Avatar. He’d been rightfully upset at being taken from his mother, like any baby that age would have been, and so he’d started bawling. Air Nomads normally waited longer to take a child from their mother, but he was special. He was the Avatar. All of the rules could be broken for him.

He’d been taken from his mother, and handed to a stranger. He’d started wailing. The stranger had begun to sing a lullaby to call him down again. And Aang had slowly relaxed, his cries hiccuping to a stop, finding this new stranger oddly familiar. That contentment and familiarity had laid the groundwork for their relationship all at once.

He wouldn’t swear to it, but he’s fairly sure that the first thing Gyatso had said after finishing the song had been, “Hello again, old friend.”

Aang relaxes back against the pillows of his sickbed, and hopes that Katara will be as forgiving to his next incarnation when he passes on.

**Author's Note:**

> the whole fic's a mess but there's parts of it that i like enough to be worth achieving.


End file.
